The
Poetry Of Becky Sakellariou
My
Body is the World
My body is the world's body straining to
find a place to lay
itself down.
My body speaks the world's body urging its ears to hear a moth's
wing.
My body moves across the screen of the night world looking
for day.
My body sleeps the world's sleep but remains still
awake.
My body is the body of this world, a woman searching
for rest.
My body belongs to the world body, skin against skin, heat,
wetness.
My body is the world's door, opening to stairs going only
down.
My body carries the oldest blood that covered the fields and
peopled
the earth.
My body's blood runs in streams so the world may pause and hold
a palm
to its wound.
My body sings its lullaby to the world's body, rocking all night
as it turns.
top
The Stag
for Israel Halpern
Your wife has migraines. I want to tell
you
of a new remedy I read about, but I do not
know you yet.
Your voice has no beard. Trim, dark, clean-
shaven, your name a whole country, mine
another language.
We tell each other things. Habits, small
confessions,
pride-and-joys. You tell me of the stag you saw
standing against
the moon, how, heartbroken, you couldn't
write
of it. I tell you my desire to stay outside the world, to dip
into it only briefly.
I hear your wife in the background, your
neighbor
come to ask your help in plowing the driveway.
I imagine you
living at the edge of a meadow that tips
down
into a pine grove where you often go when you
are tired of poetics.
Later, I see your photo, a large man with
a huge white
beard, and yet you still greet my voice softly
and are pleased
with my news. You tell me of your walks
behind your house, the field where you sat
on the rock
and watched the stag, forgetting that the
world
persists with and without us, our words barely
tracing the outlines.
I am sad that we will not meet. You say
we will.
I do not quite believe this, coming from a place
where things
rarely happen the way they are said to.
I do not know
how to say that I would like to watch you,
big and generous,
standing at the mic, speaking your stories,
dreams,
lifting our hearts, holding us all in your large
white hands.
top
Becky Dennison Sakellariou was
born and raised in New England and has lived all her adult life
in Greece. A teacher and mediator/counselor, she has recently
published in White Pelican Review, Beloit Poetry Journal and
Common Ground Review. Nominated for the Pushcart Poetry Prize
twice, she also won first prize in the 2005 Blue Light Press
Chapbook Contest for her chapbook, The Importance of Bone. At
present she is madly in love with her three grandchildren and
is often found puttering with great delight on her one acre on
the island of Euboia where olive, fig, almond, pomegranate, lemon,
apricot and eucalyptus trees grow amongst the wild sage, oregano,
rosemary and thyme, endlessly astonishing and inspiring her.
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